Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Truth About Boys

Despite the anti-boy climate generated by the girl partisans, concern over boys was growing, and in the late 1990s the myth of the fragile girl was showing some signs of unraveling. Articles about boys' educational deficits began to appear in American newspapers with headlines much like those in the British press: "U.S. Colleges Begin to Ask, Where Have the Men Gone?," "How Boys Lost Out to Girl Power," "Survey Shows Girls Setting the Pace in School," and "Girls Overtake Boys in School Performance." Studies showing the existence of a serious educational gender gap adverse to boys began to surface. This time, the media took notice.

The Horatio Alger Association, a fifty-year-old organization devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and "the American dream," released its annual back-to-school survey in 1998. It contrasted two groups of students: the highly "successful" (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the "disillusioned" (approximately 15 percent of students). The students in the successful group work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that their teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the report, the successful group is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. At the other extreme, the disillusioned students are pessimistic about their own futures, get low grades, have minimal contact with their teachers, and believe that "there is no one...they can turn to for help." The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the report, "Nearly seven out of ten are male."

In the spring of 1998, Judith Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska, published a thorough critique of the schoolgirl research entitled The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception. Kleinfeld exposed a number of errors and concluded that the AAUW/Wellesley Center research on girls was "politics dressed up as science." Kleinfeld's report prompted several newspapers, including The New York Times and Education Week, to take a second look at the earlier claims that girls were in a tragic state.

The AAUW did not adequately respond to any of Kleinfeld's substantive objections; instead, its president, Maggie Ford, complained in The New York Times letters column that Kleinfeld was "reducing the problems of our children to this petty 'who is worse off, boys or girls?' [which] gets us nowhere." From the leader of an organization that spent nearly a decade promoting the proposition that America's girls are being "shortchanged," this comment is rather remarkable.

The association's executive director, Janice Weinman, added a more candid explanation for the persistent neglect of boys' problems: "We're the American Association of University Women," she said, "and our mission is to look at education for girls and women." That would be fair enough had the girl partisans not relentlessly promoted the idea that boys were unfairly advantaged while girls were neglected. The AAUW had not merely ignored boys' problems, it had dismissed them, coaching teachers at its 1997 Leadership Conference on how to deflect questions about boys' deficits and comparing those who questioned bias against girls to "Holocaust revisionists" in its newsletter.

In this connection, it should be pointed out that while Gilligan and the AAUW had devised and successfully promoted the myth of the silenced girl, that myth had never taken hold among the students themselves. The AAUW was aware that the way students think of themselves and their teachers is at odds with the official picture it was presenting to the public. Surveying the perceptions of schoolboys and schoolgirls, the AAUW had learned that it is boys who feel neglected and girls who feel favored by their teachers. But evidently the AAUW leaders did not consider it part of the association's mission to publish these findings in the brochures that announced the tragedy of the shortchanged girl.

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers